The Psychology of "Inside Out"

[Music] What does a child's mind look like? You have memories of being a child, but that's not really an accurate representation. It's an older you reflecting on the past. Your childhood memories are likely different now from the experiences that formed them. If you have a child, you might have noticed some of these real childhood feelings returning to you briefly. You recognize them in your kid, but these moments are fleeting. You quickly come back to the adult world.

Pixar's Inside Out aims to give us a look into the inner workings of the mind of a child. For most of us fortunate enough to have seen it, it's quite moving. You might have cried a bit watching it or held back tears with all your might because you didn't want to cry in front of a child. But does Inside Out accurately reflect the child's mind and offer anything real to help them navigate their problems? Of course, does the movie mislead kids about their self-standing in the film?

An 11-year-old girl named Riley moves from a quaint house in Minnesota to the busy city of San Francisco. She's excited at first, but the reality of how much her life is changing hits her pretty hard. Her first problem is that her new home doesn't meet her expectations. It's small and dusty; nothing like what she left behind. Even worse, her family's moving truck is delayed, separating her from all her familiar items and furniture. With nothing to cook with, Riley and her mom decide to grab a pizza slice, and to her horror, the pizza is covered with broccoli.

Now the biggest challenge for Riley is that her new school is very intimidating—so intimidating that she cries in front of the other kids on her first day in class. Riley's emotions, represented by living characters, are struggling to keep up with all the changes she's been thrust into. Fear, disgust, anger, sadness, and joy are leading the control panel of Riley's mind. We spend more time with the emotions than with Riley and her parents.

The central conflict unfolds when sadness touches and changes Riley's core memories, which makes them sad. Joy tries to turn these memories joyful again but ends up getting lost in the process, along with sadness and the core memories. And so begins Joy and Sadness' mission to get the core memories and themselves back to the control center. This leaves the other emotions in charge as Riley's personality islands begin to collapse in on the absence of her core memories. These floating islands represent personality sources such as friendship and family.

Joy and Sadness manage to return to the other emotions, but the controls are broken by anger. Riley is left depressed, sitting on a bus in an attempt to run away to Minnesota. Joy then realizes her mistake; she calls to Riley. Problems arise by not allowing her to express her sadness. She rights her misguided actions by handing the controls over to sadness. Riley gets off the bus and returns to her parents in tears, telling them how she feels and setting everything right.

In this resolution, we get a helpful lesson about emotions. Emotional harmony is important for our mental health. Allowing ourselves to have feelings when they arise naturally is very healthy, especially during our formative younger years. The story also reflects and criticizes our cultural bias that values feelings of joy over sadness, much like the way we prefer extroversion to introversion and optimism over pessimism. We internalize these values and try to hide our sadness by covering it up with false joy.

Riley tries to hide her true feelings from her parents. She doesn't want them to know that the move is having a big impact on her. Her mom also pressures her to put on a happy face for her dad, who is under a lot of pressure at his new job. The story of Inside Out successfully delivers this central message about emotional harmony and a fantastical presentation of a child's mind.

But does it appropriately capture the inner workings of the child's mind? Not exactly. But before we look at that, I want to take a moment to thank the sponsor of today's video, brilliant.org, the best place online to learn STEM subjects. Inside Out is an amazing movie because of how it simplifies the complex processes that go on in our minds. In the same way, Brilliant simplifies complex subjects like artificial intelligence, social media algorithms, and complex math problems into easy-to-digest lessons.

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Back to our story: The way memory works in the film is largely inaccurate. I mean, it's a child's film. Memory is much more valuable than the movie-like playback portrays. Our memory in general is a lot messier. Overall, our memories are unreliable accounts of what happened in the past. They are distorted over time. Whenever we try to recall a memory, it gets corrupted further from the original imprint.

I do have to point out, though, that the movie accurately reflects memory when sadness can change the emotional character of Riley's core memories. Our feelings towards our most cherished memories change based on how we feel and who we've become as an adult. If you're separated from a loved one, your memories of them could be filled with a sense of loss, or they were once a source of joy.

While it is fair to have a cleaner version of memory for the audience's sake, the account of core memories is misleading. These memories aren't linked to our personality islands as in the movie. While we have important memories for our sense of identity, they don't affect us in the way the movie portrays. People who suffer from severe amnesia don't have dramatic shifts in their personality, and twins separated at birth often share personality traits regardless of them sharing similar memories. Many of our personality traits come from genetics and our environment.

The most significant detail Inside Out gets wrong about a child's mind is that it's missing an important character— a critical character to the function of a human being: Central Cognition. Between Riley and her emotions, there's nothing in reality. There's supposed to be a middle one: Central Cognition that allows us to assess perceptual data and make choices for the sake of our well-being. It is a part of her conscious experience that is completely absent in Riley and all the other human characters surrounding her.

This account of the real-life mind comes from psychology theories first presented in the late 1950s and is still used in cognitive psychology today. It establishes the mind as having two systems. System one is instinctive and unconscious. It's where we make automatic decisions without deliberation and where our emotions are processed. We have no conscious experience of the functioning of system one—only its output. System two is intentional, effortful, and conscious. It's our Central Cognition. We use it to think when our system one processes won't suffice.

Whenever you have to make a tough decision, you rely on system two. There are moments when we want our system one processes to take over, like when we need to run to safety or pedal a bike. Deliberating using system two in these moments can get you killed or make your task impossible. Central cognition exists in our prefrontal cortex alongside our working memory and executive control centers. In Inside Out, that would align nicely with the command center the emotions occupy.

In reality, Central cognition and emotions are often competing with each other, but there's no necessary hierarchy that determines who wins. Sometimes emotions drive action, and sometimes cognition takes control. It's like a disorderly scrum. When we're tired after a long day, our emotions often win. We don't even try to use Central cognition in these moments. Most of us can relate to this, having snapped at somebody by making demands of you when you're just trying to get to bed.

By neglecting Central cognition, the film implies an emotional determinism of our behavior, which is probably not helpful for kids to understand themselves. It potentially adds to the already confusing sense of self that comes with growing up. The movie doesn't acknowledge their ability to deliberate and make decisions outside of an emotional reaction. To navigate the world successfully, we need to make good use of system two; otherwise, we're at the mercy of the world and our instinctual reaction to it. Central cognition has a big role to play for kids and adults alike.

To develop the concept of Inside Out, filmmaker Pete Docter worked closely with neuroscientists and psychologists. Pixar wasn't naive about the mind when it signed off on the film, but accuracy took a backseat to other priorities. It needed to make a good story for kids and adults. Complexity can add depth to a film, but more often than not, it makes the story hard to follow. When it comes to movies for children, complexity is an even greater concern.

You could easily lose the younger audience with too many characters to follow and convoluted motivations. Pixar rearranged the processes of the child's mind to have a limited number of protagonists working towards a specific goal, all while facing a healthy amount of resistance. Adding Central cognition as a character would have been more accurate, but it would have made the story more complicated and less straightforward.

The new character could play Joy's boss role, but that would have introduced a new set of problems. For one, the focus would have been removed from the emotions and put on Central cognition. Then it would be hard to separate the internal world of Riley's mind from the external world. Since Central cognition is a conscious process, Riley can't be consciously aware of the internal adventure that is taking place, as that world represents her unconscious mind.

If Riley were aware, the reality portrayed in the film would fall apart. Perhaps the only way to be more accurate would be to show Riley's Central cognition deliberating on her choices, with her emotions overriding her at times. But that would add another layer to the film that would make the journey of the emotions less consequential. Thinking about it, in a way, the emotions being sentient is a way of representing Central cognition. They're able to deliberate amongst themselves, with Joy taking the lead.

This allows them to have a conscious thought process contained within the unconscious mind, avoiding Riley's awareness. Similarly, linking core memories to personality islands isn't accurate, but it is beneficial to the story. It gives the adventure big stakes. If Joy and Sadness fail, the personality islands are gone forever, which has huge consequences for Riley. As the audience, we root for the protagonist because failure would be disastrous. If the core memories weren't that important, we wouldn't have nearly as much investment in them.

So, while Inside Out isn't the perfect mapping of a child's mind to a set of relatable characters, its deviations make a lot of sense when considering the demands of storytelling. And the film still manages to get a very poignant message about the value of our emotions. Inside Out 2 is coming out soon, and for the sake of staying true to the original themes, you won't be seeing Central cognition or a more accurate account of memory. Still, considering the impressive impact of Inside Out, there will be new important lessons about emotions that we all need to remember. And for those lessons to get across and ring true, they'll need the focus you only get with a good story.